Bathwater Blues: A Novel Read online

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  Her mother turned and went to the kitchen table where she sat, took the remote, and flipped the television on. Addie followed her all the way, watching in fiery amazement. She ripped the remote from her mother’s hand and turned the television off.

  “God damn it, Addie,” her mother said, and grabbed for the remote. Addie pulled back. Stepped away. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I want to finish this,” Addie said. “We need to talk about this.”

  “You don’t want to talk. You want to yell like a little girl. Give me the remote.”

  I’ll show you a little girl, Addie thought. She pitched the remote across the room, where it struck the television screen and shattered, fell to bits on the floor. The screen survived.

  “Are you out of your mind!?”

  “If you can so readily detest me at every opportunity, your own daughter, I deserve to know what it is I’ve done, or what you think I’ve done. I’ve spent too long blindly thinking I somehow deserve it.”

  “You feel that way for a reason,” her mother said, settling back into her seat. “Deep down, you know who you are, and I know it even better because I’ve watched you turn into… this.” She gestured to Addie from head to toe. “It wasn’t a matter of loving someone more, it was a matter of you being a soul-sucking, love-draining, drip of a child. You were so needy, even after you were a baby—always crying about something, always so sensitive, so weak. You cried about everything. Still do. And I guess your father was more empathetic than me. I couldn’t stand it, and your dad, he… he…” Her mother seemed to lose her train of thought for a moment. “Your father was no saint, either. You know that as well as I do. You should. First you drove us apart, and then… and then… you ruined him. You ruined everything…” Her mother was shaking, her hands trembling up and down her arms. “And now here you are, pretending you’re special, like you’re owed something in life. I’m not surprised about Carter. What surprises me is that he stuck around as long as he did… But you wanted an answer, and that’s it. Feel sorry for yourself all you want, ‘cause you’re not getting a thing from me.”

  Addie was speechless. She felt small, like a sudden draft could sweep her from the room into a dark corner, a place to hide her humiliation. She’d come home for a battle she was destined to lose, and regret wasn’t a strong enough word to describe how she felt in the aftermath…

  “I’m glad you decided we should finish this,” her mother said, tapping her foot under her chair. “It feels good getting that off my chest.”

  It couldn’t end like this, Addie thought. With her mother’s satisfaction. No, that was certain.

  “He did love me more than you. I know that for a fact.”

  The foot ceased its tapping. Addie straightened, wet her lips with a swipe of her tongue.

  “You know jack shit, Addie.”

  “He told me so himself.”

  Her mother laughed, slapped her knee for effect.

  “I don’t have time for this. It’s late as it is…”

  She stood from her chair and made for the kitchen doorway, but Addie stepped to the side and blocked her path.

  “You’ll move or I’ll move you, I swear to God.”

  “He told me how he really felt about you. Why you two were always fighting.”

  “I’m going to bed,” her mother began, placing the back of her hand on Addie’s shoulder to move her aside, “and I don’t want you here when I get up in the morning.”

  Addie remained fixed where she stood, staring into her mother’s eyes, which seemed to avoid hers frantically, only looking ahead into the dark of the foyer and the hallway where she wished to escape.

  “He was sorry he couldn’t give me a better mother,” Addie continued. “He wished you were different. He said you used to be. He said he would have regretted meeting you if not for me.”

  “Sounds like an excerpt from a little girl’s diary.” Her mother shoved a little harder, and Addie seized her by the forearm, took her by the shoulders, and spoke directly into her increasingly dismayed face.

  “He said I gave him hope.”

  “Get the hell out of my way or…”

  Her mother struggled, trying to pry Addie’s hand from her shoulder, both their faces burning bright, and sweat breaking on their brows. Then, in a sudden overflow of desperation, her mother lashed her across the cheek with an open palm.

  SMAT.

  Addie’s head jerked to the side. Her lips bunched. Her fingers turned to talons on her mother’s shoulders. Taking the opportunity to expel some of her own building vexation, she drove her mother backward through the kitchen, back to the chair she’d risen from, and sat her down with a violent thrust. The chair wobbled, leaned back, and for a moment Addie thought her mother would tip backward onto the floor. But it settled forward with a loud thud. Addie bent forward, took hold of the armrests on either side of her mother, and continued speaking at eye level.

  “You’ve always hated yourself, he said, and you take it out on everyone else as a distraction. Even us. He said he didn’t know who you were anymore. He called you poison.”

  Her mother was in tears at this point, shaking her head very slowly as they rolled down her cheeks, her chin. She squeezed her eyes shut to avoid Addie’s dry-eyed gaze.

  “None of that’s true,” she sobbed. “He never said that. Any of it. He—”

  Addie stood straight again, looking down on her mother, who appeared impossibly shrunken in her chair, head turned toward the crook of her armpit as she bawled.

  “He told me all that just before he died.” She took a deep breath, feeling immense satisfaction in seeing her mother wither before her. She hadn’t seen her cry in years. “I never told you because I knew grieving was hard enough. I didn’t want to ruin your memory of him. But there it is. That’s the truth. He didn’t love you, he hated you. And so do I.”

  Addie turned and left into the foyer. She paused there, listening with her back turned as her mother wept voicelessly. She considered going down the hall and shutting herself in her room, gazed down the dark hallway toward the open door at its end. Tight. Cramped. She took another deep breath and realized she couldn’t get enough air. It was this house, she thought. She needed to leave, just for tonight, or maybe forever. But she needed out, needed the open air.

  She went to the door, opened it, stepped outside, and then stopped. She thought about looking back once more to see her mother in her sorry state. She wondered if she closed the door behind her and left, if her mother would lock her out for good. She could kiss the home of her father goodbye.

  She shut the door gently and went to her car.

  Again she drove.

  ✽✽✽

  She parked at the curb, knowing the gates would be shut. They always were, nine o’clock sharp. Luckily she knew another entrance.

  She exited her car and took a minute to lean against it, simply breathing. It was late enough that no other cars passed while she stood. A jogger in white ran by, the cords of his headphones bouncing against his chest. Addie watched him thoughtlessly until he disappeared with distance. Then she walked a ways down the side of the road, next to the wrought iron fence atop the curb. She checked over her shoulder once or twice. Before long, she came to a spot in the fence where a beam was broken out, long since lost. She looked both ways down the street, confirming she was alone, out of sight, and then carefully stepped through the gap, ducked beneath the top horizontal beam, and found herself on the soft grass on the other side.

  The cemetery stretched out before her, patchily lit by the moon under the thick trees with their unruly branches. She walked comfortably under them, navigating the familiar graves, over the designated paved pathways, deeper and deeper. She knew her way better at night than during the day, knew the dips and rises in the grass better than the lefts and rights of the grid-like roads.

  She came across a recently decorated grave, a pastel pinwheel planted in the grass at waist le
vel. She pinched the pinwheel, flicked it affectionately, and looked onward into the moonlight-dappled grounds, knowing perfectly well where she was headed. It was only a dozen or so plots away, an unremarkable location, without any trees or significant nearby headstones to remember it by. She went to it, strolling quietly.

  His grave showed bone-white in the moonlight, just a flat slab of marble in the grass, no special markings, no pinwheel. Just another grave.

  Jonathan O’Dell

  Addie sat cross-legged on top of him, plucked a blade of grass.

  She didn’t come often, but over the course of the last four years she’d probably visited his grave ten or more times, always on nights like this: hard nights, hopeless nights. She didn’t think her mother had visited once, but it was impossible to know. After all, Addie only visited in private. Perhaps her mother did the same. Or perhaps she didn’t. Not visiting wasn’t a terrible thing, really, she thought. It’d been hard the first few times herself. Hard to see the cold marble, the plain type chiseled on its surface, knowing what lay six feet underneath. She was aware he was gone. She came for herself, not for him. He didn’t hang around this place, waiting for someone to stumble over him on a hot summer’s night. It was a place, Addie thought, for the living. She was as alone here as anywhere else, possibly more so.

  Maybe the trees listened…

  She repositioned herself, lying on her stomach, arms folded over his headstone. She lay her head down on her folded arms.

  “I don’t think I can go home again.” She breathed deeply, to keep herself composed. It wasn’t working. “I have nowhere else to go, but I don’t think I can go back there…” Yet another lump climbed into her throat. She tried to swallow it down. “I’ve done something really bad, dad…”

  She didn’t want to cry. Not again. So she said nothing more. She buried her face into her arm and thought of her father, imagined him there with her, both a frightening and comforting visualization. She could see him through the dirt where she lay, an ethereal white smoke, humanoid with wispy limbs, floating from a corpse in its casket through rock and root, arms outstretched to meet her on the surface… to hold her like no one else would.

  When a breeze weaved its way through the cemetery, she thought she felt his arms around her, doing just as she wished. She shivered, closed her eyes.

  ✽✽✽

  She awoke an hour later to the sound of a woman’s laughter.

  Groggy, she lifted herself up from the cold headstone. Suddenly the cemetery was different, an unfamiliar quality about it, chilly and creeping. She’d never fallen asleep before. She thought that must have been it, now disoriented by her surroundings. She combed her hand through her hair, yawned. The laughter came again, distant. Laughter she’d heard before, a laugh that sent electric waves across her flesh.

  She got to her feet and was overcome with lightheadedness. She swayed in place, hands hovering for balance. The trees grew fuzzy. She cupped her hand over her eyes, took a deep breath. She left her father’s grave, and nearly tripped over a low headstone as she walked, staring straight ahead toward the seemingly inappropriate disturbance. Between bouts of hilarity, the woman’s voice chattered, unintelligible, somehow both muffled and echoing between the trees, sculptures, and headstones. Addie followed.

  Far off, through the hulking tree trunk silhouettes, she saw a bright white illumination. A starlight stipple. She continued toward it, what looked like a floating lantern, until she was close enough to see what it really was. Seated on a dark bench, shrouded in tree shade, she could barely see the black figure with their phone to their ear. She moved quietly toward them through the cushy grass, as though she could keep hidden, watch them unseen from afar… when her greater intuition told her they knew she was there already.

  She got close enough to see the woman more clearly, twenty paces or so left between them. The woman sat with her legs crossed, bouncing one anxiously—she wore heels—as she spoke on her phone, her sly smile revealed in a slice of phone-light at her cheek. Addie’s heart knocked furiously. She stood, jelly-legged, mustering the courage to voice her accusation, wondering if she wasn’t dreaming.

  “Who are you?” she called out from the dark, voice cracking. The woman looked in her direction, phone still held to her ear. She said nothing. Those tingly chills washed over Addie again, and she had to hold herself to keep from trembling. “Are you following me?”

  The woman slipped her phone out of sight. She still said nothing, only watched. Then, like a rising pool of shadow, she stretched smoothly upward until she was standing. A column of darkness. She remained that way, perfectly still, perfectly postured, saying nothing at all. Addie couldn’t decide if she wanted to ask again, or flee back to her car, away from this stalking apparition who laughed amongst the dead.

  “I saw you twice before,” she went on. “First at my house. Then again the next night… at my boyfriend’s apartment. That was you.”

  The figure continued its quiet watching. They remained so perfectly still, Addie repeatedly blinked to make sure the woman hadn’t somehow disappeared, that she wasn’t now mistaking an old shadow for the one that’d grown from the bench. The longer they faced each other, the more Addie realized the impossibility of this meeting being coincidental…

  “How did you even get in here?” she asked. “The gates are locked.”

  Still not a word, not a breath, not a budge. Addie took a step closer. The figure turned. Addie watched confusedly as they left the bench altogether and departed through the nearby trees, fading from view. Quickly, watching her feet as she went so as not to trip and fall, Addie made after the dark woman. Sneakers slapped the pavement as she crossed from one lawn to the next. She regarded the empty bench as she passed, chasing around the trees into the next patches of shade.

  She caught sight of the woman again, farther off than she’d expected, walking calmly, revealed in short glimpses of moonlight under the branches, until again she crossed out of view behind more trees. Addie quickened to a jog then, wondering what she expected to gain from catching her. She reached the next gathering of trees and stopped, looked from left to right, scanning the remaining sprawl of cemetery.

  What the hell…

  She walked a short ways back and forth, circling the trees, and saw no sign of anyone at all.

  “Hello?”

  The night swallowed her words.

  She returned to her father’s grave then. She hurried past, continued toward the fence on the other side of the cemetery, toward the gap at the road, wave after wave of heebie-jeebie chills splashing across her clammy skin on the way, pushing her faster and faster, until finally she was ducking through the rusting iron bars and half-sprinting on the gravelly roadside back to her car. She got inside and locked the doors.

  “What the fuck,” she whispered.

  She peered through the passenger window. Squinting through the fence, she could only see silhouettes, swaying lightly here and there. She half-expected to see the woman again, her form coming through the trees. She’d reach the fence and keep on coming, walking clean through, and before Addie knew it, she’d be sitting in the passenger seat next to her, saying nothing at all. A phantom. Addie couldn’t help but wonder how accurate a title that was. She didn’t believe in such things. Didn’t think so, anyway. But the idea alone was enough to spur her to put the keys in the ignition.

  She started the car and turned on the heat, despite it being a warm eighty degrees outside. She took out her phone and scrolled through her very short list of contacts. She didn’t think she could go home again, but was clueless to what other options she had. She knew if she asked, Carter would probably let her spend the night if she needed. But she couldn’t do that either. She didn’t want to see his face again, didn’t want to give him the chance to apologize, if he even would. She saw Sam’s name, and without any thought at all she deleted the contact. That left… basically no one. People who meant little to her or she hadn’t spoken to in years…

 
She tossed her phone onto the passenger seat, put the car in drive, and headed home.

  Chapter Six

  She parked at the curb as always, removed the keys from the ignition.

  The door would probably be locked. She didn’t have a key—another old fight altogether. After all the fights they ever had, this might be the first to get her locked out. She almost didn’t even want to try. Her mother might be waiting just inside, waiting for the knob to jiggle, waiting for Addie to knock, to plead. She’d get a kick out of that, leaving her outside like a stray. She might even peek through the blinds to see her go.

  But Addie wouldn’t go. It wasn’t her mother’s decision. If her father was alive, he’d never let her consider it. He’d protect her. Stand up for her. She’d have a key in the first place.

  She got out and shut the door. She stood in the road a moment, peering down the opposite sidewalk, paranoid she’d been followed home. Already, the cemetery felt like a dream…

  The front door was unlocked. She held it twisted in her hands, deciding if this was what she wanted, if this was for the best. Her mother hadn’t simply forgotten to lock it, she thought. She wanted her to come back. Planned for it. It was the why that troubled her. Would she be waiting inside, ready to pounce? Had she spent the last couple hours rehearsing her eviction speech, allowing Addie to come inside just so she could have the satisfaction of kicking her out on her own terms? She’d make a scene out of it, a spectacular drama, win herself a private Oscar: Best Actress for Mother’s Revenge.

  Addie pushed the door open.

  Inside was just as she’d left it. The kitchen light was on, but her mother was no longer there. Addie went in, closed the door behind her, slipped her shoes off, placed her keys in the dish. She stepped into the kitchen and saw the remote was picked up. Its shattered pieces were neatly piled on the countertop. She turned and left down the hallway. Her mother’s bedroom door, across from her own, was shut, light shining through the frame.